THE WEEK'S TOP NEWS AND ANALYSIS

By

CBSMarketWatch

The first full week of the holiday season delivered, as the cliché has it, a mixed bag for U.S. retailers, and the week's market news was not to be outdone.

A cornucopia of notable occurrences ranged from a continued shuffling at the top levels of the executive branch to the accelerating slide of the dollar to market-moving surprises from a pair of tech titans. Uncertain job news and the payout of Microsoft's whopping special dividend added to the mix.

During the week, the technology-led Nasdaq Composite
COMP, +1.03%
which reached its highest intraday level of the year in Friday trading, surged 2.2 percent. The blue-chip Dow industrials
DJIA, +1.38%
and the broader S&P 500
SPX, +1.32%
moved 0.7 percent higher in lockstep.

Tune in to CBS MarketWatch this weekend. Our weekly television show on CBS channels looks into the crystal ball to forecast this winter's energy and heating prices. Also: recently FDA-approved stroke therapies, potential deals remaining in 2004's M&A pipeline, and the increasing prevalence of woman-led home-improvement projects.

Online, we take a hard look at the Bush administration's ongoing, high-stakes game with the declining dollar.

Tim Rostan, assistant managing editor

Dollar at record low against euro

The euro sailed to a record high against the dollar Friday, with the greenback's latest woes aggravated by the November U.S. nonfarm-payrolls report, which came in well short of expectations. See full story.

Cereal exec enters Cabinet

While Cabinet upheaval has marked the weeks following the November presidential election, the market has been particularly attuned to any shuffling of the economic team. And when President Bush announced Monday that Carlos Gutierrez, Kellogg's
K, +0.25%
chief executive, would replace Commerce Secretary Don Evans, it was merely the first of what were expected to be numerous changes in that area. See full story.

Corporate insiders cash in

Insiders sold $6.6 billion worth of shares in their companies during November, up 187 percent from the previous month. It was the highest level of insider sales in more than four years. See full story.

Those surprising tech titans

On the face of it, personal-computing pioneer IBM's
IBM, +1.33%apparent decision to eighty-six PC production might have been the week's tech-sector shocker, but the market took it in stride. Not so an Intel
INTC, +1.49%
midquarter update that featured a boosting of its quarterly revenue target, which ignited chip and tech stocks and kept the broad market from succumbing to distressing economic news. See full story.

Scrooge's specter casts pall on retail

The prospect of a not-so-jolly holiday season haunted U.S. retailers as November data showed the country's biggest chain stores having a decidedly lackluster time of it. "With such a weak start, it's going to be real tough to get a strong performance for the two months," a noted industry economist told CBS MarketWatch. See full story.

Crude futures nearer $40 level than $50

Crude-oil futures fell 14 percent on the week, closing at an almost three-month low under $43 a barrel, as expectations grew that OPEC won't agree to cut its output quota next week. See full story.

The news that wasn't

Three December days. Two stock-market-related hoaxes. Loosely defined, at least. In the second, the BBC fell prey to a bogus report that the chemicals giant Dow
DOW, +0.28%
had accepted blame for the Union Carbide disaster in Bhopal, India, two decades ago. In the first incident, GeoPharma announced that a drug to treat mucositis in cancer patients had won the FDA's blessing. When the agency said it not only had not approved Mucotrol but had never heard of it, and with GeoPharma's stock
GORX
having rocketed before being halted, it began to look like a classic hoax. The reality, though, was more complex, as it turned out. See full story.

Country Report: Has Celtic Tiger changed stripes?

A decade of booming growth earned Ireland the title of "Celtic Tiger" during the 1990s, and the country may have some roar left in it, even as some of the advantages that propelled its phenomenal growth -- low taxes and cheap labor -- have eroded A decade of booming growth earned Ireland the title of "Celtic Tiger" during the 1990s, and the country may have some roar left in it, even as some of the advantages that propelled its phenomenal growth -- low taxes and cheap labor -- have eroded. See full story.

Meet the Internet's zombie stocks

Webvan
WBVNQ
that emblem of excess during the dot-com boom, went out of business years ago. It turns out that's not the end of the story, though. Nor is Drkoop really dead. In fact, plenty of long-gone Net stocks live out their days in a sort of limbo. See full story.

Reading between lines in California

When the president of Calpers, the country's largest public pension fund, is ousted because he's too tough in demanding corporate reforms, and the stock market still surges, you know we've turned a psychological corner, opines our editor-in-chief, David Callaway, who fears Sean Harrigan's ouster from Calpers, an institution that's as much a watchdog as retirement system, signals the end of the post-Enron era of shareholder activism and the beginning of a new stage of capitalist chicanery. See full commentary.

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